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A tiny independent movie has been picked by one of Hollywood's biggest moguls to promote his latest venture. Robert L. Johnson created BET and now, the Urban Movie Channel — an online channel that's being called the black Netflix.

The first original film it has acquired is a gay interracial romance set in the Deep South. In Blackbird, the main character Randy is in high school. Everyone thinks he's gay, and they're totally fine with it.

Randy, 18, is fervently religious. Even though his best friend is gay, Randy's in denial about his own sexuality.

Director Patrik-Ian Polk says Blackbird is a movie he has wanted to make ever since he left Mississippi for college and found himself in the gay and lesbian section of a Boston bookstore.

"And there was one book on the shelf I could tell had an illustration of a black person on the cover," he recalls. "I could see illustrated brown skin on the spine."

The book was Blackbird by Larry Duplechan.

"It had changed my life," Polk says. "I'd never read anything that was told from a gay black perspective."

That perspective informs everything Polk's made for the past 20 years, including his groundbreaking cable series Noah's Arc. When Polk finally adapted Blackbird, he sent the script to actor Isaiah Washington

Washington recalls: "I said, 'So, sorry I said have to be part of this — this is an amazing story. Coming from me, I know it's going to raise eyebrows.' "

That's because seven years ago, Washington was accused of using an anti-gay slur in an argument on the set of the show Grey's Anatomy. In Blackbird, he plays Randy's loving father.

All the drama around what Washington might have said on the Grey's Anatomy set did not concern Polk.

"Two actors having a spat on set — which happens all the time — and unfortunately in this media age that we live in now, that gets blown up," he says. "And suddenly he's labeled, you know, homophobe, and that's all people remember."

Polk says the label sticks with Washington even though other actors like Alex Baldwin, Jonah Hill have used gay slurs, apologized and moved on.

Since the Grey's Anatomy incident, Washington has worked in a lot of small independent films. He starred in the critically acclaimed but little-seen Blue Caprice, where he played the Washington, D.C., sniper John Muhammad.

Washington's recent films reflect his range and fearlessness, says Marcella De Veaux. She's a media relations expert who follows entertainment issues. But she was still surprised to see Isaiah Washington in a movie with a lot of gay teenage sex — some of it during church.

"If I were guiding him, I would have suggest something maybe not so controversial, maybe not so provocative," she says. "I might have said, 'Play it safe.' "

Blackbird is also opening in a small number of theaters across the country this weekend. De Veaux is impressed that it's the Urban Movie Channel's first original acquisition

"It's terrific, I mean, it's Bob Johnson," she says. "He takes chances. Why tiptoe out of the gate?"

As it happens, this is also the first movie out of the gate for actress and comedian Mo'Nique since she won an Oscar four years ago for her role in the movie Precious. Mo'Nique says she got branded as difficult, partly because she turned down every single script she was sent.

"Not only did it not touch me, it just didn't make financial sense," she says. "You know, some of the offers that I was getting, I was offered less money after I won the Oscar than before I won the Oscar."

With Blackbird, Mo'Nique is executive producing. So is Washington. That gives them a kind of power over their narratives — both on screen and off.

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European leaders attended a ceremony marking the centenary of the massacre of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I, as German lawmakers risked triggering a diplomatic row with Turkey by voting to acknowledge the historical event as "genocide" –- a charge Ankara has strongly denied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Francois Hollande were among those gathered today in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial to mark the day generally regarded as the start of the massacre, carried out by Ottoman officials who feared that Armenian Christians would side with their enemy, Russia, during World War I.

"We will never forget the tragedy that your people went through," Hollande said.

(For a history of the issue, NPR's Krishnadev Calamur has a primer here.)

The vote by the German parliament "marks a significant change of stance for Germany, Turkey's biggest trade partner in the European Union and home to a large ethnic Turkish diaspora. Unlike France and some two dozen other countries, Berlin has long resisted using the word," according to Reuters.

The Associated Press notes that France "is home to a sizeable Armenian community. Among the French Armenians at Yerevan was 90-year old singer Charles Aznavour who was born in Paris to a family of massacre survivors."

Most historians regard the events a century ago as genocide, but Turkey has vociferously rejected that label, arguing that the death toll has been exaggerated and that most of the victims died during unrest and civil war.

On the eve of the anniversary, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan again denied that the event constituted genocide. Earlier this month, Ankara froze relations with the Vatican after Pope Francis publicly referred to the Armenian "genocide."

armenian genocide

The House Select Committee on Benghazi announced plans to call Hillary Clinton to testify next month, right around the time her campaign was reportedly going to shift into high gear with a mid-May campaign kickoff speech.

At the same time, a new book about the Clinton foundation is generating the kind of headlines and news coverage no presidential candidate wants to see.

"Bill Clinton Cashed in When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State," was how ABC News put it, referring to the former president's speaking fees shooting up after his wife joined the Obama administration.

"Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company," was from The New York Times.

The story also dominated cable news.

"She's now saying that they won't take foreign donations if she becomes president," said Jo Becker, the co-author of The New York Times piece, on NPR's All Things Considered Thursday. "But what the story really underscores are the special challenges when you have a foundation that's raising money from foreign interests, that couldn't contribute to an American political campaign, by the way, but can contribute to these kinds of foundations."

The Clinton campaign declined to comment, but a campaign spokesman published a five-point rebuttal to the Times article, which was based, in part, on the forthcoming book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, which is due out May 5. The spokesman, Brian Fallon, charges that the facts in the Times' own reporting undermine the innuendo in the piece.

"Ironically, buried within the story is original reporting that debunks the allegation that then-Secretary Clinton played any role in the review of the sale," Fallon writes, adding, "The facts drawn from the Times' own reporting undermine the innuendo in the Times story about Hillary Clinton's role in this matter."

Earlier this week, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta offered a own pre-buttal to the book in an interview with Al Hunt on PBS's Charlie Rose show.

"It's a book that's written by a former Bush operative, who's a reporter for that august news institution Breitbart.com — or has been in the past," Podesta said of the book's author, Peter Schweizer, who worked for former President George W. Bush and was a foreign policy adviser to Sarah Palin in 2011.

That is classic political rapid response — question the source, blame the opposition.

Schweizer also wrote the book on Congress and insider trading that helped lead to the STOCK Act of 2012, "Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison."

Schweizer also tells Bloomberg's Josh Green he is coming out with a similar book on Jeb Bush's finances to be published this summer.

Podesta, though, not only questions the author's motives, but, more importantly, his conclusions.

"He's cherry picked information that's been disclosed and woven a bunch of conspiracy theories about it," Podesta said on PBS. "The facts, there's nothing new about. The conspiracy theories, I guess we'll get to judge when we read the book."

For Clinton, this is hardly a new experience. She and her husband have been at the middle of so many political firestorms over the years it's almost hard to keep track. On the Today Show in 1998, Clinton famously dismissed the attacks and accusations.

"The great story here for anybody willing to find it, and write about it and explain it is this vast right wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day that he announced for president," she said.

As for the Benghazi committee, Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who heads it, seems to be trying hard to avoid having his effort portrayed as a partisan witch hunt. He insisted Wednesday that he wasn't slow-walking the investigation to overlap with the presidential campaign season.

"I want it done before 2016," he said on Fox, adding, "We're trying to accelerate it, but I've got to have the documents."

In a letter to Clinton's lawyer, Gowdy said he wants the former secretary of state to testify the week of May 18th, which happens to be right around the time when Clinton's campaign has said she is going to make that bigger "kickoff" speech for her campaign.

That Benghazi committee hearing will deal mostly with her use of a private e-mail server for public business. Gowdy released 136 likely questions; eight of them are about Benghazi.

Once Gowdy is satisfied he has all the documents, he plans to call a second hearing where the committee can ask Clinton about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

That means while Clinton tries to campaign for one job on Pennsylvania Avenue, she is going to be facing questions from the other side for quite some time.

2016 Presidential Race

Benghazi

Congress

Hillary Clinton

The list of official and likely candidates for president in 2016 includes some prominent Republicans who are currently governors. Three of them — Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal — all tout executive experience as qualification for the White House. They also share something else — slumping poll numbers back home.

They've been working to make themselves familiar and friendly faces to the party faithful in early voting states, including at a big event hosted last week by the New Hampshire GOP.

Jindal, the sitting governor of Louisiana, was there. Also, Wisconsin's Scott Walker, greeting the audience in Nashua with some regular-guy, Midwestern small talk.

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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal speaks at the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit in New Hampshire. Darren McCollester/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Darren McCollester/Getty Images

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal speaks at the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit in New Hampshire.

Darren McCollester/Getty Images

"We're honored to be back here, New Hampshire," he said. "I wore a suit tonight. I didn't wear a $1 sweater like I did last time from Kohl's. Although I think this shirt is from Kohl's."

Kohl's, of course, is a reference to the Wisconsin-based department store.

And there's New Jersey's Chris Christie, who mentioned a text he'd just gotten from his 14-year-old son.

"He's at school, and he said to me 'where are you?' And i said 'I'm on my way to New Hampshire.' And he's a bit of a wise guy — I don't know where that comes from — and he said 'your new home state,'" Christie said to laughs.

It's all part of the "getting to know you" phase of an early presidential campaign. And for a sitting governor, it's a time to tell the world — especially voters in New Hampshire and Iowa — just what you've accomplished back home.

That's something Walker tried to do: "We took $3.6 billion budget deficit and turned it into a surplus. In fact we've done it in each of the last four years," he said.

But as these three governors eye the White House, each is also dealing with low public approval at home.

Walker has long been a polarizing figure due to his epic battles with public employee unions. But a new poll this week shows a new and sizable drop in his approval rating. Charles Franklin of Marquette University noted that Walker has shifted his rhetoric to the right on issues including immigration and abortion. That has likely fueled some of the drop. And, Franklin said, being out of the state so much doesn't help.

"He has had a style in which he governs by traveling around the state in presenting his case. Three, four, five events a day around the state arguing for his positions," Franklin said. "Now he isn't able to do as many of those."

Christie's popularity in New Jersey reached an all-time low this week. There was the so-called "bridgegate" scandal early last year, but more recently there's deep discontent over his handling of the economy and changes to retirement benefits for state workers.

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"I didn't run for governor of New Jersey to be elected prom king," Christie said recently. "I'm not looking to be the most popular guy in the world, I'm looking to be the most respected one." Darren McCollester/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Darren McCollester/Getty Images

"I didn't run for governor of New Jersey to be elected prom king," Christie said recently. "I'm not looking to be the most popular guy in the world, I'm looking to be the most respected one."

Darren McCollester/Getty Images

Jindal's approval is very low as well — fueled by his handling of the budget and education, among other things.

Governing is messy. And it's something a candidate not currently running a state doesn't have to worry about.

But political strategists like Rich Galen say that falling support at home — as long as it doesn't become a huge story on a hot button issue nationally — is not likely to have much impact on the presidential contest "as long as the dip is manageable."

"As long as the candidate doesn't feel that he or she has to race home to fix it. Then it's something that you let slide by and hope for the best as you move down the field," he said.

Now, there are other sitting governors who could still jump into the race. Like, say, say Ohio's John Kasich whose ratings have held up pretty well, so far.

But others wear their low approval ratings like a badge of honor. A sign of toughness. As Christie put it last weekend — he's not looking to be elected prom king.